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The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism

The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism PDF Author: Laura Kalman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300063691
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 375

Book Description
Legal scholarship is in a state of crisis, argues Laura Kalman in this history of the most prestigious field in law studies, constitutional theory. Since the New Deal, Kalman says, most law scholars have identified themselves as liberals who believe in the power of the Supreme Court to effect progressive social change. In recent years, however, new political and interdisciplinary perspectives have undermined the tenets of legal liberalism, and liberal law professors have enlisted other disciplines in the attempt to legitimize their beliefs. Such prominent legal thinkers as Cass Sunstein, Bruce Ackerman, and Frank Michelman have incorporated the work of historians into their legal theories and arguments, turning to eighteenth-century republicanism - which stressed communal values and an active citizenry - to justify their goals. Kalman, a historian and a lawyer, suggests that reliance on history in legal thinking makes sense at a time when the Supreme Court repeatedly declares that it will protect only those liberties rooted in history and tradition. There are pitfalls in interdisciplinary argumentation, she cautions, for historians' reactions to this use of their work have been unenthusiastic and even hostile. Yet lawyers, law professors, and historians have cooperated in some recent Supreme Court cases, and Kalman concludes with a practical examination of the ways they can work together more effectively as social activists.

The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism

The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism PDF Author: Laura Kalman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300063691
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 375

Book Description
Legal scholarship is in a state of crisis, argues Laura Kalman in this history of the most prestigious field in law studies, constitutional theory. Since the New Deal, Kalman says, most law scholars have identified themselves as liberals who believe in the power of the Supreme Court to effect progressive social change. In recent years, however, new political and interdisciplinary perspectives have undermined the tenets of legal liberalism, and liberal law professors have enlisted other disciplines in the attempt to legitimize their beliefs. Such prominent legal thinkers as Cass Sunstein, Bruce Ackerman, and Frank Michelman have incorporated the work of historians into their legal theories and arguments, turning to eighteenth-century republicanism - which stressed communal values and an active citizenry - to justify their goals. Kalman, a historian and a lawyer, suggests that reliance on history in legal thinking makes sense at a time when the Supreme Court repeatedly declares that it will protect only those liberties rooted in history and tradition. There are pitfalls in interdisciplinary argumentation, she cautions, for historians' reactions to this use of their work have been unenthusiastic and even hostile. Yet lawyers, law professors, and historians have cooperated in some recent Supreme Court cases, and Kalman concludes with a practical examination of the ways they can work together more effectively as social activists.

The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism

The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism PDF Author: Laura Kalman
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300076479
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Book Description
Legal scholarship is in a state of crisis, Laura Kalman argues in this history of the most prestigious field in law studies: constitutional theory. Since the time of the New Deal, says Kalman, most law scholars have identified themselves as liberals who believe in the power of the Supreme Court to effect progressive social change. In recent years, however, new political and interdisciplinary perspectives have undermined the tenets of legal liberalism, and liberal law professors have enlisted other disciplines in the attempt to legitimize their beliefs. Such prominent legal thinkers as Cass Sunstein, Bruce Ackerman, and Frank Michelman have incorporated the work of historians into their legal theories and arguments, turning to eighteenth-century republicanism--which stressed communal values and an active citizenry--to justify their goals. Kalman, a historian and a lawyer, suggests that reliance on history in legal thinking makes sense at a time when the Supreme Court repeatedly declares that it will protect only those liberties rooted in history and tradition. There are pitfalls in interdisciplinary argumentation, she cautions, for historians' reactions to this use of their work have been unenthusiastic and even hostile. Yet lawyers, law professors, and historians have cooperated in some recent Supreme Court cases, and Kalman concludes with a practical examination of the ways they can work together more effectively as social activists.

The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism

The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism PDF Author: Joseph Darda
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503630935
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 366

Book Description
How Americans learned to wait on time for racial change What if, Joseph Darda asks, our desire to solve racism—with science, civil rights, antiracist literature, integration, and color blindness—has entrenched it further? In The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism, he traces the rise of liberal antiracism, showing how reformers' faith in time, in the moral arc of the universe, has undercut future movements with the insistence that racism constitutes a time-limited crisis to be solved with time-limited remedies. Most historians attribute the shortcomings of the civil rights era to a conservative backlash or to the fracturing of the liberal establishment in the late 1960s, but the civil rights movement also faced resistance from a liberal "frontlash," from antiredistributive allies who, before it ever took off, constrained what the movement could demand and how it could demand it. Telling the stories of Ruth Benedict, Kenneth Clark, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Howard Griffin, Pauli Murray, Lillian Smith, Richard Wright, and others, Darda reveals how Americans learned to wait on time for racial change and the enduring harm of that trust in the clock.

The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North

The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North PDF Author: Brian Purnell
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479801313
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Book Description
Did American racism originate in the liberal North? An inquiry into the system of institutionalized racism created by Northern Jim Crow Jim Crow was not a regional sickness, it was a national cancer. Even at the high point of twentieth century liberalism in the North, Jim Crow racism hid in plain sight. Perpetuated by colorblind arguments about “cultures of poverty,” policies focused more on black criminality than black equality. Procedures that diverted resources in education, housing, and jobs away from poor black people turned ghettos and prisons into social pandemics. Americans in the North made this history. They tried to unmake it, too. Liberalism, rather than lighting the way to vanquish the darkness of the Jim Crow North gave racism new and complex places to hide. The twelve original essays in this anthology unveil Jim Crow’s many strange careers in the North. They accomplish two goals: first, they show how the Jim Crow North worked as a system to maintain social, economic, and political inequality in the nation’s most liberal places; and second, they chronicle how activists worked to undo the legal, economic, and social inequities born of Northern Jim Crow policies, practices, and ideas. The book ultimately dispels the myth that the South was the birthplace of American racism, and presents a compelling argument that American racism actually originated in the North.

FDR's Gambit

FDR's Gambit PDF Author: Laura Kalman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197539319
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 441

Book Description
A comprehensive, engaging, and revisionist account of the Court fight that ties it to contemporary policy debates. In the last past few years, liberals concerned about the prospect of long-term conservative dominance of the federal courts have revived an idea that famously crashed and burned in the 1930s: court packing. Not surprisingly, today's court packing advocates have run into a wall of opposition, with most citing the 1930s episode as one FDR's greatest failures. In early 1937, Roosevelt-fresh off a landslide victory-stunned the country when he proposed a plan to expand the size of the court by up to six justices. Today, that scheme is generally seen as an act of hubris-an instance where FDR failed to read Congress and the public properly. In FDR's Gambit, the eminent legal historian Laura Kalman challenges the conventional wisdom by telling the story as it unfolded, without the distortions of hindsight. Indeed, while scholars have portrayed the Court Bill as the ill-fated brainchild of a hubristic President made overbold by victory, Kalman argues to the contrary that acumen, not arrogance, accounted for Roosevelt's actions. Far from erring tragically from the beginning, FDR came very close to getting additional justices, and the Court itself changed course. As Kalman shows, the episode suggests that proposing a change in the Court might give the justices reason to consider whether their present course is endangering the institution and its vital role in a liberal democracy. Based on extensive archival research, FDR's Gambit offers a novel perspective on the long-term effects of court packing's failure, as a legacy that remains with us today. Whether or not it is the right remedy for today's troubles, Kalman argues that court packing does not deserve to be recalled as one fated for failure in 1937.

Yale Law School and the Sixties

Yale Law School and the Sixties PDF Author: Laura Kalman
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807876887
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 484

Book Description
The development of the modern Yale Law School is deeply intertwined with the story of a group of students in the 1960s who worked to unlock democratic visions of law and social change that they associated with Yale's past and with the social climate in which they lived. During a charged moment in the history of the United States, activists challenged senior professors, and the resulting clash pitted young against old in a very human story. By demanding changes in admissions, curriculum, grading, and law practice, Laura Kalman argues, these students transformed Yale Law School and the future of American legal education. Inspired by Yale's legal realists of the 1930s, Yale law students between 1967 and 1970 spawned a movement that celebrated participatory democracy, black power, feminism, and the counterculture. After these students left, the repercussions hobbled the school for years. Senior law professors decided against retaining six junior scholars who had witnessed their conflict with the students in the early 1970s, shifted the school's academic focus from sociology to economics, and steered clear of critical legal studies. Ironically, explains Kalman, students of the 1960s helped to create a culture of timidity until an imaginative dean in the 1980s tapped into and domesticated the spirit of the sixties, helping to make Yale's current celebrity possible.

Beyond All Reason

Beyond All Reason PDF Author: Daniel A. Farber
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195355431
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Book Description
Would you want to be operated on by a surgeon trained at a medical school that did not evaluate its students? Would you want to fly in a plane designed by people convinced that the laws of physics are socially constructed? Would you want to be tried by a legal system indifferent to the distinction between fact and fiction? These questions may seem absurd, but these are theories being seriously advanced by radical multiculturalists that force us to ask them. These scholars assert that such concepts as truth and merit are inextricably racist and sexist, that reason and objectivity are merely sophisticated masks for ideological bias, and that reality itself is nothing more than a socially constructed mechanism for preserving the power of the ruling elite. In Beyond All Reason, liberal legal scholars Daniel A. Farber and Suzanna Sherry mount the first systematic critique of radical multiculturalism as a form of legal scholarship. Beginning with an incisive overview of the origins and basic tenets of radical multiculturalism, the authors critically examine the work of Derrick Bell, Catherine MacKinnon, Patricia Williams, and Richard Delgado, and explore the alarming implications of their theories. Farber and Sherry push these theories to their logical conclusions and show that radical multiculturalism is destructive of the very goals it wishes to affirm. If, for example, the concept of advancement based on merit is fraudulent, as the multiculturalists claim, the disproportionate success of Jews and Asians in our culture becomes difficult to explain without opening the door to age-old anti-Semitic and racist stereotypes. If historical and scientific truths are entirely relative social constructs, then Holocaust denial becomes merely a matter of perspective, and Creationism has as much "validity" as evolution. The authors go on to show that rather than promoting more dialogue, the radical multiculturalist preferences for legal storytelling and identity politics over reasoned argument produces an insular set of positions that resist open debate. Indeed, radical multiculturalists cannot critically examine each others' ideas without incurring vehement accusations of racism and sexism, much less engage in fruitful discussion with a mainstream that does not share their assumptions. Here again, Farber and Sherry show that the end result of such thinking is not freedom but a kind of totalitarianism where dissent cannot be tolerated and only the naked will to power remains to settle differences. Sharply written and brilliantly argued, this book is itself a model of the kind of clarity, civility, and dispassionate critical thinking which the authors seek to preserve from the attacks of the radical multiculturalists. With far-reaching implications for such issues as government control of hate speech and pornography, affirmative action, legal reform, and the fate of all minorities, Beyond All Reason is a provocative contribution to one of the most important controversies of our time.

What is Liberalism?

What is Liberalism? PDF Author: Félix Sardá y Salvany
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Liberalism
Languages : en
Pages : 186

Book Description


Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974-1980

Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974-1980 PDF Author: Laura Kalman
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393076385
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 505

Book Description
Tells the history of the Ford-Carter years, discusses the relevance of the period's politics on today's issues, and explains its shaping of the current political environment.

Liberal Fascism

Liberal Fascism PDF Author: Jonah Goldberg
Publisher: Crown Forum
ISBN: 0385517696
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
“Fascists,” “Brownshirts,” “jackbooted stormtroopers”—such are the insults typically hurled at conservatives by their liberal opponents. Calling someone a fascist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale. But who are the real fascists in our midst? Liberal Fascism offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism and Mussolini's Fascism. Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term “National socialism”). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities—where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist. Do these striking parallels mean that today’s liberals are genocidal maniacs, intent on conquering the world and imposing a new racial order? Not at all. Yet it is hard to deny that modern progressivism and classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots. We often forget, for example, that Mussolini and Hitler had many admirers in the United States. W.E.B. Du Bois was inspired by Hitler's Germany, and Irving Berlin praised Mussolini in song. Many fascist tenets were espoused by American progressives like John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, and FDR incorporated fascist policies in the New Deal. Fascism was an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture and temperament. In Germany, fascism appeared as genocidal racist nationalism. In America, it took a “friendlier,” more liberal form. The modern heirs of this “friendly fascist” tradition include the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood. The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore. These assertions may sound strange to modern ears, but that is because we have forgotten what fascism is. In this angry, funny, smart, contentious book, Jonah Goldberg turns our preconceptions inside out and shows us the true meaning of Liberal Fascism.